Saturday, November 19, 2011

Innovators In Government

A book mentioned at GovCampNSW, is "The Innovator's DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators" by Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, Clayton M. Christensen (Harvard Business Press, 2011). "Innovation" is something I know a little about, having mentored a team in "Innovation ACT". The Gov Camp NSW started well, but is quickly degenerating into people from companies telling us that they are not here to give a sales pitch (while mentioning their company) and people who flew in from overseas to tell us how we can do things on-line (I came on the train).

The questions being asked are about creating public value and creating new forms of public institutions. In my view that is the easy part. The hard part is how to integrate changes into the business and politics of government.

There was a federal government Gov2.0 Taskforce which made grand pronouncements, with little apparent progress to show for it. However, if you lok under the surface, the changes caused by reformed federal government information policy and the use of open access licenses is starting to change the way government works. This cannot be done quickly, as it requires government staff and politicians to be retrained and also reliable, secure systems to be put in place to support them. A few mashups stuck on top of creaking old mainframe era systems will not do, not will some opinion collecting web sites pasted on top of a creaking old consultation process.

New South Wales is the ideal place to consider how to do government differently, due to the poor state of its government and political processes. Because much does not work well, there is the opportunity to do things differently.